Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [55]
Back in New York—“close to bedrock” as Louise put it—they landed stock leads in companies under the management of New Jersey theater magnate Walter Reade—Spence in Trenton, Louise in Plainfield. The arrangement wasn’t ideal—fifty miles separated them—but there was no economic incentive to be picky, and they figured they could see each other on Sundays, train schedules permitting. His leading lady was Ethel Remey, who had spent her entire stage career in stock and bonded instantly with Louise. When Louise left for Plainfield, Spence began taking his meals at the boardinghouse where Ethel was living, the home cooking infinitely preferable to hotel fare.
The Trent Stock Company opened its winter season on November 3 with the David Gray–Avery Hopwood comedy The Best People, and continued on the ninth with George M. Cohan’s The Song and Dance Man. It was the Cohan play that showed local audiences what Spencer Tracy could do with a dramatic role, albeit one as hokey as the “hick trouper” created on Broadway by Cohan himself. Ethel thought he acted the part “magnificently” and the Trenton Times reported an “exactness that several times brought him rounds of applause from a fair-sized first night audience.”
There followed the usual jumble of stock titles, some of which he had played before (Buddies, The First Year, The Mad Honeymoon) and many of which were new, if not particularly challenging. “I never saw any evidence of a temper at all,” said Ethel Remey, who found him a joy to play with. “He was very placid, and very easy to get along with. And no drinking, no drinking at all, possibly because he had too much responsibility.”
Once Louise was settled in Plainfield, the Tracys and a nurse brought Johnny east, and Spence came up on a Sunday so that they could all be together. Louise wrote: “Fortunately for John and for us, in those days, despite our constantly broke condition, there was always help in the offing. Spencer’s father thought, and with reason, that selling trucks was a much more substantial occupation than acting.” It was in Plainfield that Johnny had his tonsils and adenoids out because a doctor in Milwaukee had told Carrie Tracy their removal occasionally helped hard-of-hearing children. “The doctor who did it was not optimistic,” Louise said, “but he said he would remove them if we wished it.”
Not long after Christmas, when Spence found himself playing a gimmicky show called Shipwrecked, he heard from Mr. Wright, who was in the process of setting up new companies in Saginaw and Flint, and who said, as Louise remembered it, “Come on out to Grand Rapids again. We need you out here.” He didn’t need much persuading. It was practically impossible to get between Trenton and Plainfield by rail on a Sunday, and he only saw Louise and Johnny when he could persuade someone to drive him. Louise was fed up as well: “It was no kind of a life. We might as well have been 300 miles apart.”
Tracy played his final week opposite Ethel Remey in The Family Upstairs, and she mourned his loss to Trenton as few others did:
Spencer wasn’t the average stock leading man. He wasn’t the clotheshorse. He was a very fine actor, but I think a lot of people, because he wasn’t a clotheshorse, didn’t appreciate him. They didn’t know anything about acting. They didn’t realize what a gem they had as an actor, because he wasn’t the average matinee idol of that time … When Spence left, it affected me no end. They got this average stock leading man, good looking—I suppose one would call him the matinee idol sort—but he couldn’t compare with Spencer as an actor. Yet the matinee girls thought he was totally wonderful, so there you are. It was maddening.
Louise’s father, having had a classmate at Yale who was an ear specialist in New York, wrote and urged her to go see him. One snowy morning during her last week in Plainfield—the only day she had neither a rehearsal nor a matinee to play—Louise, Johnny’s nurse, and Johnny took the train into New York. It proved to be a courtesy